Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

266 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
hardly diminishes as we become wealthier, more leisured, and better
fed. Results from the 1999–2002 National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey, using measured heights and weights, indicate
that an estimated 16 percent of children and adolescents ages 6 to
19 years are overweight. Physiological perfection was even less
attainable in antiquity than it is in the modern world.
FESTIVALS
Observances help to fill what Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenthcentury
man of letters, called “the great vacancies of life.” Or, as
a Greek proverb put it, “a life without festivals is like a road that
has no inns.” Festivals regulate the flow of life. Without them, the
passage of life is in constant danger of becoming monotonous and
undifferentiated.
Yet, today, festivals generally play only a minor part in the life
of a community, notwithstanding the importance in the United
States, for example, of the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. This
state of affairs is characteristic of societies that regard their holidays
as peripheral and whose members do not closely identify with
one another through the collective memory of shared experience.
The Greeks would not have understood how society can function
without a sense of shared experience that is reinforced at regular
intervals throughout the year. Our lack of the celebratory would
have struck them as uncongenial in the extreme. Moreover, because
they did not divide the year into periods of seven days with an
appointed period of rest at the end of each week, festivals constituted
the primary pretext for recreation. They also afforded the
Greeks an opportunity to express their common identity as citizens,
tribesmen, and demesmen and to reinforce their sense of an inherited,
if invented, tradition. In Athens, more than sixty days were
devoted to state-sponsored festivals annually.
Greek festivals took many forms. At the lower end of the scale
were the deme festivals. At the upper end were the civic festivals,
in which the entire citizen body, including, in some cases, resident
aliens, participated. The best attended of all, however, were the
prestigious Panhellenic festivals, which attracted celebrants from
all over the Greek world. In the Hellenistic Period, kings founded
festivals at their capitals with the object of impressing their subjects
as well as their rivals. One such was the Ptolemaia, which was instituted
by Ptolemy II in the early third century b.c.e. at Alexandria,